Angel of Death Row For Illinois prisoners facing execution, Andrea Lyon is the last line of defense

The only thing standing between more than 100 convicted murderers and a John Wayne Gacy cocktail is Andrea Lyon, who runs the Capital Resource Center for the State of Illinois. After Death Row inmates have exhausted their direct appeals, she’s all they’ve got.

But she’s plenty. Lyon, a nationally recognized expert on death-penalty defense, is tough, smart, competitive, creative, charismatic, intimidating, passionate, unrelenting and absolutely committed to keeping her clients alive. No matter who they are, what they’ve done or how much the public would like to see them swing.

“Killing is wrong,” says Lyon. “Morally wrong. ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ you know? I believe in redemption. I’ve seen people change and do incredibly noble, generous things under horrible circumstances. People who have done nothing good in their whole lives, given one moment, one chance to do good, they can change.”

Lyon’s co-counsel on the case is Paul Dengel. Criminal attorneys, he says, sometimes need to maintain distance from their clients. But not Lyon. “She deals with our client as a person, she works with him, she relates to him. She cares very deeply about him as a human being in a terrible situation.”Lyon, 42, lives by a simple rule she learned as a child: “You see something wrong, you do something about it.” She grew up in Evanston in the ’60s, the oldest of four children in a family of far Left liberals, activists committed to civil rights, women’s rights, free speech, ending the war, saving the whales, the whole schmear. While Father was leading the family on peace marches, Mother was putting on plays by black activists and Andrea was leading walkouts, organizing demonstrations, singing in a mostly-black chorus and dragging home strays.

“She’d bring home wounded animals, even worms,” says Lyon’s mother, Yolanda Miller, head of the theater arts department at Roosevelt University. “She brought some old man home one time-she said he looked hungry-and scared me half to death. She’d come home and say, ‘Mom,’ and there’d be something about the tone of her voice. I’d ask her, ‘Two legs or four?’ “

Before Kelly met Lyon, he knew of her. “I’ve done extensive reading, and I’d read a lot about her,” said Kelly from DuPage County Jail. “Everything told me she was a great attorney. She has spent her entire legal career defending the rights of individuals. She’s not a former prosecutor whose heart was left at the state’s attorney’s office. I came away from our first meeting feeling how dedicated she was. She gave me her home phone number, and she’s always available to me.”

Says Lyon, “I remember my mother picking me up after I had been leading a demonstration and saying, ‘Can’t you just break curfew like a normal teenager?’ “

After graduating from Evanston Township High School and Rutgers University, Lyon, to no one’s surprise, chose to attend the non-traditional, liberal Antioch School of Law in Washington, D.C. “It was the place for people who saw the law as an agency for social change,” says Lyon’s father, Harvey Lyon, a management consultant.

“I wanted to save the world,” says Lyon.

Students worked on actual cases, and one of Lyon’s was a man accused of raping his daughter.

“He was a hillbilly, and he had no idea why he was in jail,” recalls Lyon’s father. “He said to Andrea: ‘She’s my property, isn’t she? If she’s big enough, she’s old enough.’ This to my daughter, a committed feminist. There was steam coming out of her ears. She had to decide right then whether her job was to judge or defend. It was a key event for her. She decided he was her client, and she got him off. There was a technical error in the arrest. But she hated him. She couldn’t look at him. I told her, in hunting, once a dog brings down its first prey, you say it’s blooded. After that, she was blooded.”

After law school, Lyon joined the office of the Cook County public defender, eventually heading the homicide task force. It’s a place that attracts “lawyers concerned about poor people getting a fair shake in the system,” says Mike Morrissey, current chief of the task force, who shared an office with Lyon.

She was able to win her clients’ trust, the key to any lawyer-client relationship. “It’s hard for public defenders,” says Morrissey, “because the client hasn’t personally hired you. Andrea would prove she deserved trust by keeping her word. She’d meet with a client and she’d tell him, ‘Look, I’m going to do the following things-interview witnesses, do research, file motions-and I’ll come back in a week and show you,’ and she would.”

“Most of my clients have never had promises kept to them,” says Lyon, “not by people of any authority.”

Her preparation for cases was legendary in the public defender’s office, and it still is. “For every hour in court, I’ll spend 10 to 20 getting ready,”says Lyon.

“That came from her last semester of law school,” says her father. “She was assigned to a judge who heard every kind of case. She said what she learned was that the lawyer who won was the one who was well-prepared. It wasn’t the facts of the case or the brilliance of the attorney, it was the preparation.”

Life on the line

Lyon would often do her own investigating, going into the city’s worst neighborhoods. “She put her life on the line more than once,” says Lyon’s sister Rachel Lyon.

“There was more than one night when she was down on the South Side trying to get witnesses to testify against gang members.”

In court, Lyon, who is 6 feet tall, would put on quite a show. “Juries would weep, people would faint,” she says, not altogether kidding. To make her point, she was prepared to cry, get angry, bully.

She says she once cross-examined a police officer so ferociously that he came off the witness stand and tried to choke her.

“That,” she says, “was a good moment.”

Another was when she delivered her closing argument handcuffed to the witness box so jurors would appreciate the conditions under which her client made his confession.

“I do a lot of acting,” says Lyon. “I once acted out a whole crime in front of the Illinois Supreme Court: shots ringing out, everyone running, falling to the floor. The justices looked bored; I figured I had to wake them up. I won seven-zip.”

Prosecutors use words like “dangerous” to describe her. “No question, when you went to try a case against her, you went to war,” says Anthony Calabrese, who was in the Cook County state’s attorney’s office for 13 years. “She can bully a judge as easily as a prosecutor, and if she senses any weakness, she’ll exploit it in a minute. It was clear she was protecting, not just her particular client, but all the potential clients in society and the Constitution.”

Lyon might look comfortable in the courtroom, but she says that trying a case, which she still does occasionally, is “terrifying. I can’t eat. I wake up at 2 in the morning thinking of something I should have said. The whole time I’m afraid.”

“What I do is hard,” says her sister Rachel, a filmmaker, “but if I fail, it means I didn’t make as great a film as I could have. If Andrea fails, somebody goes down. They die. We all act like what we’re doing is life and death, but with her it is, all the time.”

“Eventually I’ll lose, won’t I?” says Lyon. “I’ve won 18 out of 18 death hearings. Eventually they’re going to get me, right?”

Lyon started the Capital Resource Center in February 1990 in a spare bedroom in the Evanston house she shares with her 5-year-old daughter, Samantha Lyon. (”I’m one of those single mothers Dan Quayle disapproves of,” she says.) The center is part of a federal program aimed at providing representation for Death Row inmates and speeding up the appeals process.

Today the center’s offices are on West Jackson Boulevard. There are 16 full-time employees, including four attorneys, and an annual budget of $700,000. Lyon makes $62,000, “about $20,000 less than a starting associate in a big firm right out of law school. About a quarter of what I’m worth on the open market.”

Motivated by life and death

Money has never motivated her, although with a finicky boiler, car-repair bills and a child, it has its appeal. Still, she says: “I don’t understand why anyone would spend $100,000 on a car. You’ve got $100,000? Buy a car for $25,000 and give the rest to people who are hungry.”

What motivates her are the high stakes for which she plays. Once, when Lyon was depressed, her father asked her why she didn’t get out of criminal law.

The center works only with Death Row inmates whose cases have been tried and lost and whose direct appeals have been heard and lost. The center’s attorneys look at each case from scratch. The public, which according to opinion polls is overwhelmingly in favor of the death penalty, thinks they’re looking for nit-picking technicalities.

Lyon strenuously objects.

“My client needed 27 stitches in the back of his head and an operation on his testicles after the police finished getting a confession from him. That’s my technicality. What we do is look at all the facts surrounding the trial and the client’s life. We see if evidence should have been brought out that wasn’t and if there was evidence in the control of the prosecution that was hidden and other constitutional violations.

“To my surprise, even though I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve tried 130 murder cases myself, I can’t think of a single case where there hasn’t been some form of prosecutorial misconduct. I expected to find it sometimes, I didn’t expect to find it all the time. I was suprised.

“We have a lot of innocent clients. That is another thing that surprised me. I thought we’d have a case, two cases, but somewhere between 10 to 15 percent of our clients didn’t do it. Wrong guy. Wrong guy altogether.”

In addition to four staff attorneys, the center has a panel of 180 lawyers that work either pro bono or for a nominal fee.

One is Mark Latham, who had never tried a criminal case, let alone one involving a capital offense, before working with the center. The experience changed him.

“Before, if someone asked me how I felt about the death penalty for someone like John Wayne Gacy, I would have said, ‘Who cares?’ But now, I have a much better sense of why someone gets sentenced to death. It’s not the O.J. Simpsons of the world. It’s, by and large, people of color who are indigent. They come from abusive families, they have limited intelligence. These aren’t excuses, they’re reasons why people grow up and kill. These are the people we’re routinely sentencing to death.”

About the best the center can do for them is get a death penalty reduced to life without parole. It’s a bargain some don’t want to make.

“I tell them, if at some point they want to make a decision about ending their own life, it’s one thing, but if they think I’m going to sit by and let the state murder them, they’re crazy,” says Lyon. “Life is hope, and hope is good.”

Lyon believes in redemption. She says she has seen it happen. She has seen people-murderers-given a chance do something “noble.”

She is thinking, perhaps, of Robert Langford. At 15 he was convicted of murder when he handed a gun to another boy who killed a gang member. He served 20 years. He was released and killed two people in a drug war. Lyon was with the public defender’s office, and he became her client.

She explored his background with him. At 13 he watched his father try to kill his mother. At 15, while in jail, he was raped repeatedly. His life, he realized, was over, but he hoped he could save his two nephews. So he talked to them from jail, telling them over and over not to do what he had done.

Lyon brought both nephews to his sentencing hearing. One is working on his master’s degree at the University of Chicago, the other is a highly decorated Marine sergeant. Both credited him with keeping them off the streets.

“Now you tell me his life isn’t worth something,” says Lyon. “And he’s the rule, not the exception.”

Still haunted by the case she lost.

Of all the defendants Andrea Lyon has represented, the one that still haunts her is Steve Shore.

She says he was an innocent witness to a 1982 murder. Two members of the El Rukn street gang identified Shore as the killer and threatened his family if he told what he saw. Lyon, then a public defender, thought the case against Shore was weak. He had never been in trouble, and there was no physical evidence against him.

She told him to take a bench trial.

“Everyone knew I won the case but the judge. I lost. I wrote the appeal, I lost the appeal, 2-to-1 with a 60-page dissent.”

Although she left the public defender’s office in 1990, Lyon has continued to represent Shore at her own expense. The case has bounced back and forth between state and federal courts and taken many twists and turns.

One witness recanted, a new witness appeared and a gang member confessed to the murder.

“I go back to court. I beg the prosecutors on my knees: ‘Please, go talk to these witnesses, just talk to them. This is the wrong guy. He’s been in jail for a decade. Go talk to him.’ But they won’t talk to him. They won’t do anything. It’s on appeal. I argued it in June before the Illinois Appellate Court, I’m waiting for a decision. It’s very hard to keep working on the case, to keep watching this guy who didn’t do it, to watch him get destroyed in prison. Every time I think about it, I feel like a failure. I don’t know if I’ll ever get him out.”

Lyon has said that she doesn’t believe in “pure evil,” that for every violent crime there is a reason, “a dark and complex key out of the defendant’s childhood.” Here is the “key” to one client, currently sentenced to die in three states for a seven-week crime spree that occurred 11 years ago and resulted in the deaths of eight people, including several children.

“When he was born, his mother put him in the garbage. She didn’t want him. His grandmother, who was 32, rescued him. She would tell him he was just garbage. . . . No one ever changed (his diaper). He only ate when his grandmother was home. No one else fed him.

“When he was 8 or 9, he was at school-he was already a troublemaker-and he refused to sit down when the teacher told him to. So she sent him to the principal. The principal ordered him to sit down. He wouldn’t sit down. The principal reached over and pushed him on the shoulder and forced him to sit down. He jumped up screaming, leaving a pool of blood on the chair. He was being used as a prostitute and had been sodomized so much he couldn’t sit. You know what they did for him? They gave him an ice pack. That’s it. “Now, I feel like saying: ‘What did you think he was going to grow up and do? What did you think was going to happen to that boy?’ You know who he is? Alton Coleman. That beast you’ve read about.”

Although her office handles only appeals, Lyon likes to try one or two cases a year, to keep her skills honed. She does them pro bono, on her own time. She is using her vacation time to work on the trial of James Kelly Jr., a former vice president of Merrill Lynch accused of murdering his ex-wife in 1991.